Over five years since its launch, Cashfree’s Easy Split remains central to automating post-payment processes in India’s growing digital economy, now with enhanced integration and broader platform applications.
More than five years after Cashfree unveiled Easy Split on 15 June 2021, the product is still being pitched as a fix for one of the least glamorous problems in Indian digital commerce: what happens after the customer has paid. Cashfree’s current documentation describes Easy Split as a tool for collecting payments, deducting commissions, settling vendors automatically and adjusting vendor balances when refunds are issued. That is a more tightly integrated proposition than the launch message in 2021, when the company said businesses could plug the product into their own collection set-up and use it chiefly to automate the split-and-settle layer. (prnewswire.com)
The latest product material also fills in some of the operational detail that was missing from the original sales pitch. Cashfree says a single transaction can be split among up to five vendors, that vendors can be paid on standard, instant or on-demand cycles, and that unsettled transactions are usually grouped into one vendor payout a day. In other words, the real selling point is not the checkout itself but the accounting trail afterwards: who gets paid, when they get paid and how refunds are clawed back. That logic had already spread beyond retail marketplaces by 7 May 2020, when ETBFSI reported that Cashfree was pitching a similar settlement framework to insurers, web aggregators, brokers and third-party administrators, including a marketplace-settlement feature for intermediaries and an instant-settlement option promising access to funds within 15 minutes of payment capture. (bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com)
At launch, Cashfree cast Easy Split as a product for a much wider class of platform businesses than online shopping sites. The 2021 announcement said it could be used by marketplace aggregators, fintech services, edtech businesses and on-demand services, while the company said it expected more than 1,000 marketplaces to gain access to the feature by the end of that year. Akash Sinha, Cashfree’s co-founder and chief executive, said the product would add “transparency and control over fund movement and vendor management”. The line was clear: automate the commission maths, reduce the bookkeeping and stop finance teams spending their time on repetitive seller payouts and refund adjustments. (prnewswire.com)
Easy Split was not, however, a wholly new idea inside Cashfree. TechCircle reported in April 2019 that the company’s gateway already supported split payments for marketplaces, instant refunds, bank-account verification and Auto Collect, a virtual-account product for matching inbound payments. The same report said Cashfree had been founded in 2015 by Sinha and Reeju Datta, was serving more than 12,000 businesses and counted Xiaomi, Tencent, Delhivery, Zomato, Cred, Club Factory and ExxonMobil among its clients. JM Financial’s digital-payments sector report, published on 6 November 2019, separately described split payments for marketplaces as part of Cashfree’s wider API banking platform, said the company had processed INR 60 billion to date and put its user base at more than 15,000 businesses. JM Financial also traced earlier funding rounds, including Y Combinator backing in 2017 and a USD 5.87 million Series A in April 2019. (techcircle.in)
By June 2021, the company was using Easy Split to reinforce a much larger growth story. A newspaper report that month on State Bank of India’s investment in Cashfree said the payments group was handling USD 20 billion in annual transactions, serving more than 100,000 businesses and operating in eight other countries, including the US, Canada and the UAE. The same report named Zomato, CRED, Nykaa, Delhivery, Acko and Shell among businesses using Cashfree for ecommerce collections, vendor payments and marketplace settlements. Sinha said SBI’s backing underlined Cashfree’s role in building “the fastest and easiest way to collect payments and make payouts for growing businesses”. Cashfree’s current corporate page shows how far those claims have since been scaled up: the company now says it processes USD 80 billion a year and, in different parts of the same page, says it serves either 8,00,000-plus or 1 million-plus businesses. Its website also carries a Reserve Bank of India payment-aggregator authorisation effective from 16 December 2025. (brightpunjabexpress.com)
The broader strategy did not stop with marketplaces. On 6 March 2024, The Economic Times reported that Cashfree had launched Embedded Payments for software platforms such as enterprise resource planning systems, customer-relationship-management tools, SaaS products and billing platforms. The premise was familiar: developers should not have to bolt on payments, compliance, refunds and settlements one component at a time. Sinha said the company had built a solution to “effortlessly onboard businesses and manage their accounts and payments.” In that sense, Easy Split looks less like a one-off product and more like an early building block in Cashfree’s attempt to sell payment infrastructure to any platform that sits between a buyer and several payees. (economictimes.indiatimes.com)
What has changed most since the 2021 launch is the packaging. The original announcement suggested Easy Split could sit alongside a business’s own payment-collection arrangement. Cashfree’s current product page, by contrast, says creating an Easy Split account automatically activates Cashfree Payment Gateway, and that gateway-collected payments are then split through an integrated flow that also handles refunds. The current documentation says the feature can also be used with payment links, payment forms and subscriptions. Cashfree now also spells out the commercial trade-offs more plainly, saying faster settlement schedules cost more than standard T+2 cycles and that settlement timing remains subject to bank approval, business model and risk parameters. (prnewswire.com)
That leaves the core pitch much as it was: the pain point for a growing marketplace is rarely the first payment, but the growing pile of commissions, reversals, failed transfers, reconciliations and vendor disputes that follow it. Cashfree’s own history shows the company has been circling that problem for years, first through marketplace settlement features inside a broader API banking stack, then through Easy Split, and more recently through platform-wide embedded payments. For Indian businesses that sit in the middle of a multi-party transaction, the commercial question is whether outsourcing that ledger work is cheaper and safer than continuing to run it in spreadsheets and bank files. (prnewswire.com)
Disclaimer: This article is intended to inform and educate, not to recommend or endorse any financial product, investment or strategy. Please consider your own financial circumstances and seek professional advice where appropriate before making financial decisions.
